More Dutch art acquisitions during WWII era questioned

ROTTERDAM, the Netherlands — In 1943, an official of an art clearinghouse the Nazis set up in the Netherlands to sell looted Jewish property approached the director of the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam.

He had four works he wanted to sell, including the oil painting “Woman Seated on the Grass at the Edge of a Meadow and Reading,” by Nicolaas van der Waay.

The museum director at the time, Dirk Hannema, might not have known the painful specifics of the painting’s provenance. It had belonged to Izaak Leefsma, a Jewish paint manufacturer, and his wife, Helene Leefsma-Meijer, who had both been deported and, only months earlier, murdered in a concentration camp.

But Hannema, the top museum official for the Dutch shadow government set up by the Nazis, must have known about the ugly business dealings of the art clearinghouse, the Muhlmann Agency, historians say. He bought the Leefsmas’ painting anyway, and it would remain in the Dutch museum for 57 years until its return to the heirs of the family in 2000.

Researchers now say that they’ve found 30 additional works still in the museum that have “questionable provenance” and might have been looted, most of them acquired during Hannema’s tenure as director from 1921 to 1945.

“He collaborated with the Germans, and he knew what he was doing,” Sjarel Ex, the current director of the museum, said of his predecessor.

Alhough Hannema’s relationship with the Germans has been previously recognized by historians, the details of his collaboration are being revisited these days as part of a sweeping review by Dutch museums of their war-era record. In a recent report, the Netherlands Museum Association announced that, after a decade of research, Dutch museums have so far discovered 172 artworks in their collections with problematic histories, suggesting they may have been looted or sold under duress.

Across Europe, museums are still grappling — some more diligently than others — with how to identify and handle works of art that may have a tainted wartime history. The Dutch drive gained significant momentum in the late 1990s, although the process has moved forward since only in fits and starts. The research has expanded over time to include not just art acquired by museums before or during the war but also gifts that came later that have suspicious gaps in their provenance.

This year, as part of the renewed research efforts, the Boijmans, now known as the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, supplemented its inventory process with a report by an independent historian, plus an exhibition, “The Boijmans in the War: Art in a Destroyed City,” that discusses Hannema’s role.

“Our hope and intention is that, with this project we can do justice to the people who have lost their works of art,” said Hanna Leijen, head of the documentation center at the Boijmans. “And if the museum is not the right owner, that we can return it. We do not want works of art on our walls that have this harsh and problematic history, and so that’s an important task that we’ve tried to perform to the best of our abilities in the last years.”

Under the Dutch system, the return of looted works is handled by a governmentappointed panel. Since it was established in 2003, the panel has recommended the return of hundreds of looted works of art, including 202 works from the collection of the Dutch-Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker.

Many works that Dutch museums now see as having questionable provenance were returned to the country by the Allies after the war, but they went to museums instead of their owners.

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